The 2016 election process has been difficult to follow for many reasons. The more one pays attention, the more one thinks on it, the stranger and more bewildering the spectacle becomes.
Perhaps the historical view will make much more sense in a couple of years. But to take the immediate process, as it is in motion, one (or at least someone like myself) is struck with an overwhelming sense of dissolution of perception and anticipation. And perhaps this is the nature of participating as a politically interested observer, as a subjective entity that is affected by the object of its perception. If this truly is the process of a breaking apart, one participates in the breaking apart; one becomes it.
One can only fix into one's mind some historical analogue, and hold tight to it to anticipate events, as the two major parties dance and transform, mirroring each other in their mutual desires for status quo in the face of the impossible, both cracking under the pressure, albeit in different ways. A morbid and grotesque unity of the opposites.
If a more coherent piece comes together it would make for some interesting writing. But one vague impression that I would like to get onto paper is as follows:
Donald Trump does seem to be the embodiment of a breaking or a rending. One looks for a person in the Western sense, as an integrated aggregate of interests and desires which affects some sort of material efficacy in the physical world, which does things and causes things, but one has trouble finding it.
Trump is a whirlwind of smiles and nods, of hand waves, of carefully chosen words and not so carefully chosen words, and it all seems to be constantly shifting. There is no expertise or competence or even efficacy, in the Western sense. One gets the impression that his is an instinct of raw accumulation and preservation (it is the extreme accumulation and the preservation that accompanies the violent dissolution) and that the anxious bootlickers, friends, and family he gathers around him are nervously guiding his movements for him, riding his naked drive and navigating him like some ungainly vessel.
He is as a shifting mosaic, his fractured pieces attempting to mirror and harmonize with the tumult of the society and the earth around him. As a communicator and a doer in a complex society, he appears as an abomination, but his instincts are excellent. And perhaps that is the terrifying source of his growing power. He is at the center of a hurricane which is gaining its spin off of the ambient social dissolution.
I'm no fan of the fascists, but I think there is some truth to their insistence on instinct and the gut, especially in a time of dissolution. And where you find dissolution in a modern democracy, you find fascists wiggling their fins, slowly becoming cognizant of friendlier waters for terror.
This isn't to say Trump is an isolated incident. I too (and others with shared sentiments) am experiencing an inner dissolution of higher order desires, relations, and understandings. Instinct appears as a welcome friend. One's heart, one's gut speaks, and if one listens, one is rewarded. Especially in a milieu such as we have today.
After all, the breaking apart of higher order symbolic and social constructs necessitates a return to the instinctual base, so as to further a sound reconstruction. One doesn't have to be a fascist, or engage in the project of shoring up white supremacy and capital, in order to navigate dissolution.
As for Hillary! Yes she does appear to be the integrated Western individual. She moves through debates and cocktail parties alike, saying the right things. She exudes confidence and competence. She traverses our constructed complexities with a grin. But one brushes off the frost on the surface a bit and suddenly her efficacious self is quite disastrous and incompetent indeed, especially when integrated into the grid.
Her instincts are terrible! Hillary and all of her slick peers are very competently making a mess of things no? The higher order fabric she moves within destroys everything it touches without.
But also the nature and direction of an instinct is just as important. Hillary's instincts are terrible and she's making a mess, but Trump's instincts are pretty good and he's accelerating the same process of dissolution. Geo politically, these two figures do seem to be spatially related to each other: their differing instincts are bound together by an overriding desire to maintain the instruments of domination, if only in differing ways, making the two and their respective constituencies gradations of a spatially bound surface.
And so if Trump is the breaking and the rending, Hillary is the weakening and the corroding that prepares the surface for the breaking. The two need each other to dance.
Pick your poison!
This may seem a curious stance, but I hope I'm quite wrong. I intend to keep watching and thinking, or at least trying to anyway.
